About the Staff

Janine Jagger,
Director

Janine Jagger, M.P.H., Ph.D., is Professor of Medicine at
the University of Virginia School of Medicine. She is founder and
director of U.Va.'s International Healthcare Worker Safety Center.
Dr. Jagger received her master of public health degree from the
University of Pittsburgh, and her Ph.D. from the University of
Virginia. Early in her career, her research focused on brain trauma and
motor vehicle safety. Over the last 20 years, Dr. Jagger has focused on
reducing healthcare workers' risk of occupational exposure to
bloodborne pathogens. In 1988, she and her colleagues published a
landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine identifying
device design as the cause of needlestick injuries and laying out
design criteria for reducing risk to users. In 1991, Dr. Jagger
developed the EPINet (Exposure Prevention Information Network)
surveillance system for healthcare facilities to standardize the
tracking of needlestick injuries and blood exposures. EPINet is now
used in dozens of countries worldwide. In 1994, Dr. Jagger founded the
International Healthcare Worker Safety Center to propagate the findings
from the EPINet research network and to accelerate the transition to
safety-engineered needle technology. She was awarded a MacArthur
fellowship in 2002 in recognition of this groundbreaking work. Dr.
Jagger and her colleagues are the inventors of six patented safety
needle devices.

Jane
Perry, Associate Director

Jane Perry, M.A., oversees publications and communications for
the Center. She served as editor of the Center's journal, Advances
in Exposure Prevention, from 1994 to 2005. She has lectured
extensively on topics related to needle safety in the U.S., Canada, and
other countries. In addition to AEP, she has written for numerous
journals and published regular columns on exposure prevention for
Nursing and Outpatient Surgery Magazine. She co-authored, with Janine
Jagger and colleagues, an article in the New England Journal of
Medicine on "Risks to Health-Care Workers in Developing Countries," and
a chapter on "Occupational Exposure to Bloodborne Pathogens:
Epidemiology and Prevention" for the 4th edition of Prevention and
Control of Nosocomial Infections, edited by Dr. Richard Wenzel. She has
also served as an expert witness for the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA).

Ms. Perry received her B.A. from Scripps College and M.A. from the
University of Ottawa.

Ginger Parker, EPINet Program Coordinator

Ginger Parker has managed the Center's EPINet program since 2000.
She re-designed and enhanced EPINet, a surveillance system that tracks
sharps injuries and blood and body fluid exposures to healthcare
workers, bringing the original 1992 DOS program into a Microsoft Access
application. Ginger also upgraded specialized versions of EPINet for
the OR and dialysis centers.

Under Ginger's direction, the international distribution and
translation of EPINet has expanded from five countries in three
languages to 83 countries in 23 languages. Because healthcare practices
and terminology can vary among countries, Ginger works with users
abroad to customize EPINet for a specific country's needs, while
insuring consistency and compatibility among the many versions and
translations. She works closely with frontline users of EPINet,
including physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel, as well as
representatives from national ministries of health, the World Health
Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (part of the CDC).

Ginger's responsibilities include providing technical support and
conducting training for EPINet users in the U.S. and abroad, and
overseeing the collaborative research database that the Center
maintains. Each year she gathers and merges exposure data from
participating U.S. hospitals and generates the annual EPINet
Needlestick & Sharp-Object Injury report and EPINet Blood and Body
Fluid Exposure report, which include the average sharps injury rate and
blood and body fluid exposure rate. These data are widely used for
benchmarking purposes by healthcare facilities throughout the US.

Ginger collaborated on the development of three survey instruments
and the corresponding data analysis programs: Blood Exposures among
Healthcare Workers, Blood Exposures among Surgeons, and Blood Exposures
Among Anesthesiologists. The first survey has been translated into
French and Spanish.

Ginger is the co-author of numerous articles with colleagues at the
International Healthcare Worker Safety Center.

Elayne K. Phillips, Director of
Research

Dr. Phillips joined the International Healthcare Worker Safety
Center in 2003, first as a part-time research consultant and currently
as a full-time faculty member. At the Center, areas of special interest
include the impact of U.S. legislative and policy mandates on
healthcare worker blood exposure risk and needlestick injury rates, for
which she received a research grant from NIOSH; occupational exposure
risk in African healthcare settings; and the development of low-cost
strategies for reducing healthcare worker risk in resource-limited
countries.

Dr. Phillips' past research focused on the impact of healthcare
legislation on healthcare delivery systems and the health of
communities. She was awarded an NIH grant to conduct the first major
study examining the shift from U.S. hospital-based to home-based
nursing care, and published extensively on this subject.

Dr. Phillips received her B.S.N. from Temple University, and her
M.P.H. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Public
Health.